Apparently, for a large number of readers, the choice whether they select to read a paper or not is often strongly influenced by the title.

I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?

This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions).

One title that I find memorable is:

Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix by C. B. Moler and C. F. van Loan.

EDIT:
The response to this question has been quite huge. So, what have I learned from it? A few things at least. Here is my summary of the obvious stuff: Amongst the various "memorable" titles reported, it seems that the following statements are true:

A title can be memorable, attractive, or even both (to oversimplify a bit);

A title becomes truly memorable if the accompanying paper had memorable substance

Titles that are bold, are usually short, have an element of surprise, but do not depart too much from the truth seems to be more attractive in general.
5.101 Mathematical succinctness might appeal to some people---but is perhaps not that memorable for me---so perhaps such titles are attractive, but maybe not memorable

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3

For news article and fiction, certainly; in some rare cases for expository material. But I can't say it's ever happened to me for math research articles (I'll post an almost-exception in the answers). And just as well, really, most papers have really dull titles! (The worst is when the titles are dull and vague.)
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Thierry ZellOct 31 '10 at 14:45

4

I'd have put in "A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting" as an answer, but that's carrying a joke too far I think.
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J. M.Oct 31 '10 at 15:19

11

Entertaining as this list may be, I seriously doubt that it will be a useful prescriptive guide as to how to title one's papers. Editors' and readers' tastes also change over the years
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Yemon ChoiOct 31 '10 at 19:35

5

Since this question seems to have turned into a big list of "memorable/amusing paper titles," ignoring the primary question "what makes the title of a paper memorable?", perhaps it might be helpful to re-ask that question but without the loophole "...or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable".
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Mike ShulmanNov 1 '10 at 0:23

8

I have now caught a duplicate answer for the second time in as many days on this thread. To me this casts doubt on the usefulness of this thread, but I acknowledge that I have a long-standing bias against these types of questions, which from previous discussions on meta seems not to be shared by most people
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Yemon ChoiNov 2 '10 at 1:19

@adamo: Two students in our institute wrote their master thesis based on a book written with typewriter in which a footnote roughly in the middle never ended and became the main text.
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j.p.Nov 3 '10 at 20:57

There are some rather obvious aspects to the question that perhaps should be mentioned.

"For a large number of readers, the choice whether they select to read a paper or not is often strongly influenced by the title."

Yes, but it is also strongly influenced by the abstract and introduction.

"I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?"

Since most answers refereed to the second part, perhaps it is worth answering the first part of the question as well. Perhaps the main thing that makes the title (and paper) memorable is the content of the paper.

"This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions)."

Overall, the reaction in the mathematics community to catchy titles, personal descriptions, jokes of various kind, and various other things that can be seen as PR-related or "salesmenship" are mixed. So while it is always good to have a clear title having an overlly catchy title can also backfire.

I think given the papers that I have seen being cited here, a conservative moral might be: the more powerful the content (or the writer) of the paper, the bolder the title one may select. More important to me is to figure out a good balance between catchyness, precision, and informativeness. I would not want to sacrifice the latter two in favor of the first one, unless I had a breakthrough result.
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SuvritNov 5 '10 at 16:51

7

I would put it more strongly: if you are in the position that the community won't mind your papers having catchy titles, then you probably aren't reading MO to get advice.
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Arend BayerNov 5 '10 at 18:25

The first title is easy for me to recall whenever I need to refer to the paper. The second title sounds fancy (though the article itself is not) and, more importantly, is unpronounceable by me, therefore I have put some stretch of mental effort into memorising it.

As to the original question---What makes the title of a paper memorable?---, personally, when I look for things to read, my attention tends to be captured by titles that are short and sweet, for instance, Jean-Pierre Serre's Trees, Ken Brown's Buildings. These monographs/papers usually turn out to be the authorative treaties of the topics, with material unforgettable for one working in the field.

One of my favorite titles from control theory is a 1978 paper by John Doyle entitled "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators." It is memorable because of the abstract "There are none." The paper shows that optimal controls may be fragile; the 3-word abstract says it all.

Noone beats Mick gets some (the odds are on his side) by V. Chvatal and B. Reed. It is an article about the satisfiability problem, and the title is of course referring to this song. I havn't read the article, and the only reason I know the it is its title.

Lovasz's "Hit and Run Is Fast and Fun". In that he proved the hit run algorithm on sampling from log concave distributions on a convex set in the Euclidean space has a polynomial mixing time, hence fast.